So Tony Blair turned to alcohol – it's a rare PM that doesn't

Prime ministers from Herbert 'Squiffy' Asquith to Margaret Thatcher have enjoyed a drink – but Winston Churchill was in a league of his own

Tony Blair and France's then president Jacques Chirac with pints of beer in Darlington in 2000. Blair has admitted he used alcohol as a prop during his 10 years as prime minister. Photograph: Remy De La Mauviniere/EPA

Tony Blair's candid admission that he used alcohol as a "prop" in his stressful life – and probably drank more than was wise – may irritate voters who suffer weekend rowdiness which they blame on New Labour's promotion of laxer licensing laws.

But drinking as such has rarely been a controversial matter for modern British prime ministers, though lesser colleagues have been ruined after falling in the gutter. Literally so in the case of George Brown, Harold Wilson's mercurial deputy: he was a talented politician who – fatally – could not hold his drink as hard-drinkers like Michael Foot or Nye Bevan could.

Wilson himself drank furtively, pints and his pipe in public, brandy and cigars indoors. He had a drink before PMQs, which he hated – as most PMs do. Jim Callaghan is the exception: he gave it up during his premiership (1976-79).

So Blair is unremarkable in taking comfort from a glass, though he took care to stay fit and monitor his erratic heart. He had seen that his convivial predecessor, John Smith – a prodigious Olympic medallist for boozing, he notes in A Journey – had never been drunk when it mattered, but drank heavily in company despite his own heart condition. In 1994 it killed him.

A century ago HH Asquith, the last Liberal premier (1908-16), was often the worse for wear at the dispatch box and acquired the nickname "Squiffy".

His successor David Lloyd George, though an accomplished adulterer, disapproved – a reflection of his Welsh nonconformist roots and the temperance movement's influence before world war one, which brought a clampdown on drunkenness, especially in munitions factories.

Margaret Thatcher, the most dominant PM since Winston Churchill, also drank – Scotch for preference, sometimes before lunch.

She also drank at night – too much after her retirement, it has been reported. But Churchill was – and remains – in a league of his own, boasting: "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."

His tastes were catholic and his appetite powerful, though he is usually associated with Pol Roger champagne and brandy.

It was part of his image, along with the Havana cigars, at a time when lapses by public figures were more closely protected by their friends and the media.

Any suggestions of drunkenness in the Commons were usually a matter of private speculation and Labour MP Bessie Braddock's remark – "Winston, you are drunk" – is apocryphal. So is his ungallant reply: "Bessie, you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober."